'An Underhanded Approach to Disputes'

U.S.-based author and economist He Qinglian, a former editor at the state-run Legal Daily newspaper in Shenzhen, talks about Beijing's changing attitude to foreign journalists in the wake of recent beatings and detentions. She says that incidents like the detention last weekend of Sky News reporter Mark Stone on Tiananmen Square, as well as beatings last week of Hong Kong journalists who tried to film near the Beijing home of jailed Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and his wife Liu Xia, are part of a change in China's attitude to the rest of the world:

This sort of thing happens more or less every month in China. In the case of journalists from places like the U.S. and the U.K., the journalists are rarely detained for any longer than 48 hours. They are also quite well-treated, and not subjected to very serious violence. They might get kicked or punched. We saw this sort of thing start to happen about three years ago. But if the journalist is from a smaller [less influential] country, then they aren't treated so well. This is in line with China's attitude to other countries in the United Nations. For example, the journalist for Al-Jazeera wasn't given a visa to stay in China. Things are worse for journalists from Taiwan and Hong Kong, but the Chinese Communist Party still treats them better than it treats mainland Chinese journalists.

I will explain this. From around 2005, there was a change in Beijing's attitude to foreign investors. This coincided with China's attitude that it was on the rise and that the rest of the world would have to accept it. At the same time, they abolished a lot of the concessions for foreign investors. There was a lot of talk around this time of overtaking the U.S. as the world's largest economy in the next 10 years.

Recently, they have been sending unidentified men to beat up foreign reporters, so that when foreign diplomats bring it up [with China's leaders] they can say they don't know about it, and that they'll have to investigate, but really I think this is an underhanded way of dealing with international disputes [about the protection of journalists.] I told everyone several years ago to watch out for this: that this government is becoming more and more like a criminal organization.

Reported by Yue Yang for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated by Luisetta Mudie.